Monday, April 24, 2017

Summer of 1816. Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife, Mary Shelley, went to Villa Diodati to visit the famous poet Lord Byron. Due to the weather in that year, the couple, the poet and his personal doctor (John Polidori) spent the night reading German ghosts stories. Then Lord Byron challenged his guests to use all their intellect to create each one a terror story. As a result, today we can enjoy stories like 'The Vampyre' by Polidori or the magnificent 'Frankestein' by Mary Shelley.

Today in our step back in time we are going to talk about some kind of Villa Diodati of cybersecurity. We will also discover why it is our fault that hackers are still present in our nightmares and we will know more thoroughly one of the members of the group Int3pids.

We begin by talking about the Securmática past. For the most absent-minded, this congress is the oldest cybersecurity event in Spain. In it, professionals from all over the industry gather to discuss the latest developments in the sector. Companies as big as IBM, BT Iberia, S2Group, BP, Vodafone, GMV, Blueliv, Aquae Security or S21Sec, come and rub shoulders with the best of security with the aim of sharing their knowledge to make the Internet a less dangerous place and eliminate all the possible ghosts that lurk to get our data.

On the other hand, we verified that we ourselves are responsible for continuing to feed these "monsters" that infuse us with terror. According to a report carried by Verizon, we are so little concerned about our cybersecurity that most hackers still use techniques that they practiced 10 years ago. The report, taken from the analysis to 100,000 security incidents and more than 3,000 data thefts, also deals with other issues such as the origin or the frequency of the attacks.

Finally, we do not want to finish without reviewing the interview to Román Medina-Heigl, better known as RoMaNSoFt. This hacker belonging to the group Int3pids, has earned a place in the pantheon of Spanish hackers thanks to his extensive career, both in the underground world and in the most famous hacking circuits.

One of the most important and influential books of science-fiction in universal literature came out of Villa Diodati. Thanks to this gathering of prodigious minds, we met the character of Frankenstein, who enriched our culture and literature as we could never imagine. Events such as Securmática also try to enrich our knowledge and therefore, to make the world of cybersecurity evolve.